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Ubuntu Gutsy (7.1) on a Toshiba Satellite A100-022


As holiday geek-fun I installed Ubuntu 7.1 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) on my Toshiba Satellite Laptop A100-022 (a laptop which surprisingly is difficult to find information online). It was a great pleasure for me to note that Ubuntu is the first 100% (or 99%:) laptop friendly Linux distribution. Most of laptop functionalities worked out of the box and I had to do only minor tweaks for having a production-ready development system.

As someone wrote Ubuntu has mitigated most of linux geeky edges while polishing it for the desktop. I used Linux since 1995 (Slackware 1.0) and during the years I used several distributions on servers and on desktop machines. Every distribution I have used didn’t perform progresses that I got with Ubuntu 7.1. This is the first desktop-distro that has satisfied all requirements and desiderata of a laptop mobile user (mine at least …).

Following table show functionalities working at the moment and a brief description of tweaks that I needed to do:

Feature Status How
Video WORKING Out of the box
Audio WORKING Out of the box
CPU Frequency Scaling WORKING Out of the box
Hibernate WORKING Out of the box
Standby NOT WORKING Not yet tried to fix it
Networking (Ethernet and WiFi) WORKING Out of the box
Touchpad (with tap-scrolling features) WORKING Out of the box
LCD Brightness WORKING Some hack needed
Laptop buttons NOT WORKING Not yet tried to fix it
External Monitor NOT TESTED YET -
LID Management WORKING Out of the box
Bluetooth WORKING Some hack needed
Bluetooth PAN (for UMTS/HSDPA) WORKING Some hack needed
3D Graphic effects WORKING Out of the box
VMWare WORKING Some hack needed

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2008 01 08 Hack Comments (0) Permalink

Recording streams with mplayer (real audio, asf, …)

Problem: I have a Unix server (BSD at the moment) always on and I want to record real audio streams daily, encoding them in mp3 to listen later in my ipod.

Solution: mplayer, lame, shell script and cron

1) I wrote a script called record.sh that get an output filename and an url representing the stream to record

#!/bin/sh
# Usage:
# record.sh <file> <url_to_record>
mplayer -quiet -cache 32 -vc dummy -vo null -ao pcm:file=$1.wav $2 > /dev/null
lame –quiet –preset radio $1.wav $1.mp3
rm $1.wav > /dev/null

2) I wrote a script that grabs my favourite program. Call it for example grab_xyz.sh

#!/bin/sh
RECORD=/home/pc/bin/record.sh
filename=/data/shared/P2PDownload/toListen/$(date+%y%m%d)_xyz
$RECORD $filename rtsp://url/xyz.rm

3) Finally I edited a cron job (cfr: crontab -e)

# Record ‘XYZ from Live Stream’ (from 13.30 to 14.30)
30 13 * * *     $HOME/bin/grab_xyz.sh
30 14 * * *     /bin/killall mplayer

4) At end I’ll find (in toListen directory)

060118_xyz.mp3
060117_xyz.mp3
060116_xyz.mp3
2006 10 09 Hack Comments (0) Permalink